9 Movie Critics on the Movie Reviews They Got Wrong

A lot of readers like to think of critics as people who give definitive statements: "Here's my opinion, take it as a fact." Images abound of the critic as a sort of elite, sitting in their ivory tower, throwing barbs at cultural objects with the fortitude of a person who thinks their subjective opinion stands as objective reality. They're all Anton Ego from Ratatouille—steadfast, overly discerning, and often jaded, unable to really enjoy anything. Of course, there is no objectivity in criticism, and just like with anyone else, a critic's experience, knowledge, taste, and preferences will evolve over time. Sometimes, they'll even change their mind!

In November, the film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote in New York Magazine about his experience with Todd Solondz'sHappiness, a film he initially hated, but about which he discovered, in time, how wrong he was. In the magazine, Seitz wrote, "I was one of the few New York critics who was not entirely enthused by [Welcome to the Dollhouse], his 1995 breakthrough, and I hated Happiness. Just hated it." Seitz held that position for a long time, even as he saw and enjoyed other films by the director. "I'd seen most, though not all, of Solondz's films and the only one that made me almost violently reject it was Happiness." Seitz wrote. "I watched Happiness again 12 years after first reviewing it and thought it was amazing."

In his article, Seitz goes on to talk about offering his mea culpa to the director of the film himself, in person. The funny thing about Seitz's story is that such changes of heart are far more common for critics than many might expect. Critics are people, too, of course. Personally, I can still remember my first time watching The Godfather, a movie I only came to in my early 20s. I thought it was impressively made, with a few standout sequences, but overall dull and too long. How bold of me to dislike a classic! Of course, another viewing a couple of years later set me straight. Sometimes we get things wrong. Sometimes our minds change, or our taste, or our experience. So it goes.

In thinking about Seitz's story, and the times my own opinion has changed on a film, I asked several other film critics to share their stories of films they've had a change of heart over.

Glenn Kenny (New York Times, RogerEbert.com, author of Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor)

American Beauty was one of the first movies I reviewed as the official film critic for the late Premiere magazine, and man, did I go to bat for it big time—refusing to see the things about it that were obviously second hand, or to notice the ways it was literally incoherent. There are some things about it I still admire (Spacey always cracks me up, it's a weakness), but I really let my initial enthusiasm get the better of me. In any event, my critical championing of it did get me invited to defend the movie on The O'Reilly Factor… Is that something I'm supposed to brag about?

Aisha Harris (Slate)

For years, everything I ever heard or read about the movie Car Wash skewed negative, or at the very least, condescending—often, it's been incorrectly lumped in with the blaxploitation genre merely for being a black movie that came out in the '70s. Earlier this year, while putting together Slate's Black Film Canon, a couple of prominent thinkers on black film history suggested this was worthy of being considered one of the best, and when I finally sat down to watch it in full for the first time, I had to agree with them—Michael Schultz's day-in-the-life tapestry is sprinkled with low-brow humor, to be sure, but it's also trying to get at something deeper: revealing the humanity of the black working class.

Mark Harris (Vulture, author of Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War)

When I was 18 I saw The Best Years of Our Lives for the first time and took it in as a corny, sincere old movie about the generation of men who, like my father, couldn't stop talking and thinking about World War II. When I saw it again many years later, what struck me most wasn't just how wrong I was—it is one of the greatest American films ever made—but how little I had understood it. The Best Years of Our Lives is about a moment of American history, but it's also about masculinity and fear, disappointment and anger, isolation and indecision and identity—and because I wasn't ready for it, I hadn't let myself really see it. It was a movie I had to grow up into.

Charles Bramesco (contributor to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair)

Maybe it was the infamous festival fatigue, or maybe I had become a different sort of viewer over the course of six months, but here's all I know to be true: When I saw Robert Eggers' colonial horror film The Witch at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015, it was a tedious display case for meticulous production design that only remembered to be scary in its final fifteen minutes. When I saw The Witch a couple of weeks prior to its theatrical release in February, it was a slow-burning nightmare paced with supreme confidence, its near-absolute verisimilitude an object of admiration instead of annoyance. I feel like a fool for ever doubting it.

Alissa Wilkinson (Vox, co-author of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World)

I first saw The Big Lebowski in college—theoretically the ideal setting to watch the movie, but I was having none of it. What was all this random, unintelligible crap? Why was someone peeing on the carpet? A few years later I saw it again—after I'd grown a bit as a movie watcher and learned that seemingly disjointed or chaotic plots were probably that way for a reason—and it was a transformed movie: hilarious, dark, and loaded with meaning. I guess I was just outta my element.

Richard Brody (The New Yorker, author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard)

The elegance and apparent classicism of François Truffaut's later films—by which I mean everything that comes after The Soft Skin—long blinded me to the furious passions and tangled obsessions that seethed beneath their well-wrought surfaces. Such movies as Mississippi Mermaid and Small Change, which I had considered a derivative thriller and a sentimental amble, suddenly appeared to rumble with deep pain that threatened to shatter their hard-earned sense of control at every moment. The film of Truffaut's that opened my eyes to his artistry was a belated viewing of A Gorgeous Bird Like Me, which, under its bumptious humor, struck me as an ingenious and anguished fusion of Truffaut's cinephilic visions with his own wild childhood. For me, it illuminated his entire career.

Dana Stevens (Slate)

This is hardly a major monument in film history, but five years after its 2011 release, I'm fairly sure my initial interpretation of Jason Reitman's dark comedy Young Adult was inaccurate by 180 degrees: My understanding of what the film was setting out to accomplish was the precise inverse of its true intention. The alcoholic, unempathic, and possibly mentally ill protagonist (played with admirable ruthlessness by Charlize Theron) at first struck me as so loathsome a human being that I was irked by what I saw as the script's attempt to redeem her character by appealing to the audience's pity. But after a lively podcast debate with my editor--who liked the film much better than I did—I watched it a second time, and was mortified to recognize that, in fact, the arc of the story points its self-sabotaging heroine not toward but away from redemption. She's an awful person who, having been given many chances to change, learn and grow, remains stubbornly awful—a sadder, more ambiguous and braver ending than I had at first been willing to grant.

Lou Lumenick (New York Post)

I've reviewed thousands of movies since 1981, so it's inevitable there are going to be some bad calls. I totally didn't get Blue Velvet, but probably my biggest goof was panning Raiders of The Lost Ark early on because I judged it inferior to the serials it was playing homage to. I eventually saw the error of my ways and owned up to that in 2011. More recently I wrote a nitpicky blurb for La La Land out of the Toronto International Film Festival that I quickly had doubts about. So after I retired from the Post in October, I went back for a second viewing—a luxury I too seldom had as a working critic with administrative duties—and decided I loved the movie when I didn't have to watch it while suffering from festival fatigue and reacting to other people's earlier rave reviews.

Armond White (Out, National Review)

I was infatuated with Reds back in the early '80s when I attended Columbia (I reviewed it for The Spectator) and now find it misshapen, superficial, and embarrassingly non-epic. But then I saw Rules Don't Apply, and now Reds (at least Beatty and Keaton's performances) is almost forgiven. At first shocked by the depth and terror of Robert Altman's Short Cuts, I have come to find it prescient and magnificent—no movie since has equaled it.

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